>It also felt unnecessary, you bought the game off Steam, Steam didn't let you buy anything and then anything not-made-by-valve, so why couldn't you just play CS directly, why did you have to install an additional app on your limited hardware?
My understanding was they were solving the update problem:
Back in the day, every CS update broke the community - not everyone updated at the same time, and if you update then you can only join a server that's updated. Most people don't update immediately, and servers want to only update when most users have updated, so as a result the servers don't update. But now users don't want to update because their favourite server hasn't updated yet.
This happens every time the CS devs ship a bugfix.
Solution: force updates. Servers now have no reason not to update. The community stays unified, updates aren't inherently socially painful. That's what Steam accomplished for CS.
I absolutely do not miss "download button roulette" on cnet or whatever site it was where it you had the joy of playing "which of these 3 banners saying 'DOWNLOAD NOW' is actually the download button and not a sketchy ad that will ruin your day"
And then manually applying them. If the game was old enough you might need to apply multiple patches, something you'd have to figure out. I definitely had mixed feelings about Steam at first, and my internet connection at the time was such I'd hoard some larger patches and didn't like the idea of re-downloading them on reinstall but there is no doubt now that where Valve was going with this was the future.
Oh god! Fileplanet. That also reminds me of "Download managers". They were literally apps that would search for the same file from multiple places so that it could try to part the download up and then combine the file at the end. It was like BitTorrent before BitTorrent.
This was it 100%. I lived through this and that was exactly why Steam continued to be used in our LAN groups. Even for LAN parties, it made it super easy for everyone to make sure they were on the same version of everything. Extending that to online play is the reason it persisted to this day.
My understanding was they were solving the update problem:
Back in the day, every CS update broke the community - not everyone updated at the same time, and if you update then you can only join a server that's updated. Most people don't update immediately, and servers want to only update when most users have updated, so as a result the servers don't update. But now users don't want to update because their favourite server hasn't updated yet.
This happens every time the CS devs ship a bugfix.
Solution: force updates. Servers now have no reason not to update. The community stays unified, updates aren't inherently socially painful. That's what Steam accomplished for CS.